weather forcasts
 

Did you notice that every website has a different forcast? Is there a more trustworthy in anybody's experience?

Many years ago, Ambrose Bierce wrote that 'A Barometer is an ingenious instrument that tells us what kind of weather we're having'. That basically sums up many weather 'forecasts'. If you happen to have a barometer about your person, hold it out the window: if it gets wet, then it's probably raining!

No weather forecast is going to be 100% accurate, because they can only predict on the basis of past experience, and only for relatively large areas. They can work out that the rain might come in your general direction, but not necessarily that it'll rain in your street rather than a mile or so away.

I never really bother with them. Add or remove layers for warmth, and judge the possibility of rain day by day. "As soon as I touched my seaweed..........."

skydog, checking internet or TV forecasts it is still obvious that predicting weather in advance hasn't changed much from the days of our ancestors. Sure we have sophisticated technology such as satellite imagery, but they had better weather noses and studied the patterns and local signs. But it all goes to say that weather is fairly unpredictable more then a day in advance! Having said that I find that CNN weather online has a better batting average for my part of Italt then most others.

personally, I think we are MUCH more sophistocated about weather predicition than we were even 10 years ago. And, I'm not sure I agree that every website has a forecast that is really that different but perhaps I am wrong. I have personally found weatherunderground to be a good soure of weather info for Europe.

However, when I was recently in the UK I had any number of people remark that, "our weather has changed" or "our weather isn't like it used to be" and if that is true then it could explaing some of the difficulties with forecasting "based on previous events."

Ah, but in Britain, we are world champions at two things: complaining that things aren't the way they used to be, but also finding plenty of precedents from the past to justify inventing instant traditions (or weather patterns). What hasn't changed much (so far) is the extent of the spectrum within which our weather is generally variable: rarely as extreme, violent or long-lasting as in the middle of large land-masses.

We always had accurate weather forecasts when we lived in El Paso, Texas.

From March to November it was "Sunny, hot, windy, and dusty." The rest of the year it was "Sunny, not as hot, windy, and dusty."